Si2 Announces Distinguished Service Awards

Published 10:44 PM ET Sat, 10 Nov 2012
Business Wire

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) announced that it is presenting two Distinguished Service awards at its 17th Si2 Conference to be held on October 9, 2012, at the Network Meeting Center-Techmart, Santa Clara, CA. The first award will be to James A. Culp, Manager - Design Rules and Implementation Design Technology Integration, IBM, and the second will be presented to Professor W. Rhett Davis of North Carolina State University.

The Distinguished Service Award to Jim Culp is based on his strong leadership of 2 projects at Si2, first with the DFM Coalition and now with the OpenPDK Coalition. He has provided clear direction to both projects melding the interests of IBM and its alliance partners with those from the rest of the industry so that the resultant standards will be readily welcomed by both the EDA and user industry. His clear and unwavering support for standards as enablers for business progress is a benchmark for others to follow.

The Distinguished Service Award to Professor Davis is based on his over ten years of support of Si2 in various capacities. Two examples stand out - he was the first academic to adopt OpenAccess into his course work and lab exercises at North Carolina State University. This served to train fresh students in this new platform, thus proliferating knowledge in this nascent area of development. He has worked closely with other members of the Low Power Coalition in the seminal study of leakage contributors and lately has been working with the same team in defining potential new standards for system-level low power design. His team also developed, with funding from Si2 and SRC, the 45nm FreePDK Base Kit which enabled the Nangate FreePDK45 Generic Open Cell Library.

Si2 is the largest organization of industry-leading semiconductor, systems, EDA and manufacturing companies focused on the development and adoption of standards to improve the way integrated circuits are designed and manufactured, in order to speed time-to market, reduce costs, and meet the challenges of sub-micron design. Now in its 24th year, Si2 is uniquely positioned to enable timely collaboration through dedicated staff and a strong implementation focus driven by its member companies. Si2 represents nearly 100 companies involved in all parts of the silicon supply chain throughout the world. See www.si2.org.